Q23 - Diplomat: Every major war

[mcrittell]

Got it down between A and D. Not going to lie, I had no idea what A even meant.

I understand that there's a big leap from increased weapons acquisition to preserving peace, but that's about it.

[timmydoeslsat]

This stimulus basically says:

Every major war within the last 200 years has had countries, that participated in those wars, acquire a lot of weapons quickly before entering those wars.

It concludes that arm control will preserve peace.


We can diagram these things to get a core like this:

Major war past 200 years ---> Participant countries quickly loaded up on weapons before entering those wars

-----> Therefore

~Load up on weapons before entering wars ---> ~Wars

The issue is a temporal one. The first conditional in this stimulus, which is used as a premise, describes a necessary characteristic of every major war within the last 200 years.

This does not have to hold true for the future wars. The subject matter of the conclusion and the premises has been altered.

Answer choice A can be restated as saying:

The author believes that if you do not have counties loading up on weapons, then you will not have a war.

Now, the author is believing "Well, hey if I take away the necessary condition of major wars, then there will be no major wars."

The issue is that we do not know what the necessary characteristics of future wars will be.

[LSAT-Chang]

What about (D)....?

[bbirdwell]

Hey timmy, good explanation...

I'll add a bit.

Even if we don't fully symbolize it as timmy did, and think of necessary conditions, we should at bare minimum note the conditional trigger language "Every" and "will"...

And, as mcrittell said, we should see that there's a leap from "weapons acquisition" to "preserving peace." It would be awesome if we could also see that "weapons acquisition" and "arms control" are reasonable negations of one another (we could be primed to see something like this by recognizing the conditional triggers).

So we might think "I don't exactly how to state the flaw, but it's some kind of conditional thing having to do with arms and peace."

Then we might read (A) and say "Huh?" At least it has conditional relationships, and the argument certainly does claim that some events consistently preceded others. Let's leave it.

(B) "simply because weapons are used in war" does not describe a premise from the argument.

(C) no. the argument does not say the same thing twice.

(D) So what? It doesn't matter whether the increases are in response to having omelettes for breakfast, or in response to other countries. The reasoning behind the increase is immaterial to what's being presented -- when there's an increase, there's a war.

(E) no. This would strengthen the argument rather than point out a flaw.

[shaynfernandez]

I have a question about C, moreover about the circular reasoning flaw in general.

I think C is a trap for two logical shortcomings we may have.

If you fall for "Every" conditional cue you are fairly likely to attempt to diagram leading to:

Major war --> increase acquisition of weapons

Then continue to the conclusion which provides the "Will" typical conditional cue, stating:
Arms control agreements--> preserve peace

Or what was tempting for me to do was translate into

~increase acquisition of weapons --> ~war

Which WOULD be circular reasoning, if one made this translation, right?

[daniel]

I got this question right, but I want to make sure that I didn't get it right for the wrong reason, since my process was a little different than what's been described in this thread.

I didn't see this argument as using conditional reasoning, but rather as a fallacious causal reasoning argument. Isn't the assumption here that an increase in arms causes major wars? What if major wars are caused by something else (and can still be fought using a small number of weapons)?

This would be similar to an argument that says: people who smoke later develop lung cancer, so not smoking prevents lung cancer. (And what if the person works in an asbestos factory?)

Answer choice A was worded a bit differently than what I expected, but ultimately it was not much different from what I anticipated.

[ohthatpatrick]

To answer the question about the circular argument from (C), I see what the poster was saying, but it still wouldn't be a circular argument.

When we diagram the premise and the conclusion, we often end up oversimplifying what they are saying. The premise is about the past. The conclusion is about the future. So one cannot be a repetition of the other.

But the way the poster was diagramming the argument, it's easy to see how we could get confused into thinking they were saying the same thing.

The other big gap though is equating "arms control agreements" with "~sharp increase in acquisition of weapons".

Of course, the author DID have that match in mind, but those are not the same idea, so LSAT would be testing a language shift (or logic gap), not circularity.

Circular arguments are INCREDIBLY rare, while the flaw answer choice that says "Hey, it was a circular argument" is incredibly common. In a pinch, never guess the the circular argument answer. It's going to be wrong 10 times more often than it's going to be right (maybe even more drastic than that).

A true circular argument is ridiculous and often obvious:
Chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream. After all, no other flavor of ice cream is as good as chocolate.

To respond to the last poster's notion that this is more of a causal flaw, I agree with you. That's definitely more of how I saw it.

Just because every Y was preceded by X, that doesn't mean that X caused Y. (And if X isn't really the cause, then getting rid of X isn't necessarily going to get rid of Y)

Analogous Example:
Every episode of "The Today Show" over the past 20 years has been preceded by a sunrise over the eastern U.S. seaboard. Clearly, therefore, if we can prevent the sun from rising over the eastern U.S. seaboard, we will not have to deal with "The Today Show" being broadcast anymore.

Great flexibility in diagnosing the flaw as causal but still understanding how (A) could be applicable.

[Amir.m.shoar]

I wanted to add some of my process to this discussion, since I know that answer choice A is bit difficult to digest. I broke down the question with conditional logic like so:

P: ACQ -> WAR
-----------------
C: ~ACQ -> ~WAR

(ACQ = acquisition of weapons)

I think that this argument is just a negation of the premise, and answer choice A mimics this.

A) The argument infers, merely from the claim that events of one type (ACQ) have for a long time consistently preceded events of a second type (WAR), that an event of the second type will not occur unless an event of the first type occurs"

it's important to remember to negate ACQ because of the word unless.

[ohthatpatrick]

I like the thought, but the way you conditionally diagrammed the premise is incorrect.

The trigger word in that first sentence is "Every", which indicates the sufficient condition.

So the first sentence would be diagrammed:

WAR --> ACQ

I think you were setting up your conditional by thinking chronologically, but you can't base conditionals on that.

If I say, "Every practicing lawyer has taken the LSAT", we get
Lawyer --> took LSAT
and NOT
took LSAT --> Lawyer

Obviously, we know the LSAT came first chronologically, but conditionals indicate the direction of certainty.

If you're a lawyer, I'm certain you took the LSAT.

If you took the LSAT, I'm not certain you're a laywer.

So if you were to think of this argument conditionally, you would seemingly get a valid argument:
Prem - WAR --> ACQ
Conc - ~ACQ --> ~WAR

Of course, this argument is flawed, so our seemingly airtight logic up there must be awry.

The problem is that the symbols "WAR" and "ACQ" do not mean the same thing in the premise that they do in the conclusion, because "WAR" in the premise means "every major war in the last 200 years", whereas the conclusion isn't saying anything about every major war in the last 200 years. The conclusion is talking about wars in the future. Similarly, "ACQ" in the premise refers to past tense events and ACQ in the future refers to future events.

It would be best not to try diagramming this argument, because by abstracting these specific historical/forward-looking ideas into symbols we make it seem like we can connect them symbolically, when really we can't.

[Amir.m.shoar]

Ahhh, I goofed the "every." Thanks for clarifying, Patrick.

[Ibrahim.diallo]

I narrowed it down A and D and went with D. I over-thought the conclusion of the passage. I felt like the passage had way too many flaws, equating the absence of war to mean "peace", and "arms control agreement" to mean no flow of weapons. So I thought those were the flaws. With that in mind, I picked D over A. D provided another reason for the acquisition of weapons that may not lead to war - the threat of war (mutual destruction - neighbors having enough weapons to scare each other) is what is contributing to the peace... like I said, thought way too much here.

generally for flaw questions, should I be suspicious of outside information? it just seems like D being wrong is attributed to "out of scope".

[ky1e510]

It might help to think about it in terms of which answer choice is a more accurate description of the flaw itself. D is appealing because it intuitively makes sense, but it is also a pretty specific consideration. When i do flaw questions I try categorize the flaw in the stimulus. I categorized this one as a post hoc fallacy ( Y followed X so Y must have been caused by X). A matches the category of the flaw I predicted, whereas D appears to describe a what if scenario that could be interpreted as an example of someone committing the same flaw. So when I am stuck between two choices and i can't seem to eliminate either of them, I'll lean more heavily towards the choice that describes the main categorical flaw I predicted from the stimulus. I also gravitate towards answer choices that do not make sense unless i paraphrase them

[tommywallach]

I really like Kyle's point here--including the second one about correct answers requiring paraphrasing. His explanation of the difference between the two answer choices is also spot on.

-t